“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 1

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"Legal ethics is a misnomer ... lawyers conducting themselves
legally are not necessarily conducting themselves morally ."...and
..."The zero sum nature of the legal system, combined with the universal
adoption of zealotry as the marching orders of practioners and
prosecutors, transforms the moral mission of the legal system from one
of truth-seeking, storytelling, and justice, to one of fabrication,
distortion, and manipulation in pursuit of victory. These victories,
however, make us all losers.".

Thane Rosenbaum

Privacy, Sealed Records and the Public's Right To Know

There
is a public nature to a dispute in front of a court in spite of the dispute
starting originally in a private matter. Often private aspects of a case are
placed in a sealed record thus the record is on file but are not reported. But
what should and should not be considered private is debatable. There has been
increasing use of "secret settlements" or agreements between a
plaintiff's attorney and the defense attorney to keep certain information from
the public. When does the public's right to know, outweigh the privacy rights
of the parties involved?

Often
these secrecy agreements are done in order to maximize the financial settlement
to the plaintiff and to minimize embarrassment to the defendant. But if the
plaintiff gets a large (sealed) settlement and the defendant gets silence, the
final outcome for the public is silence. No one contests the need for innocent
parties to be kept secret, but in many cases such as Firestone tire safety
case, the prescription drugs Zomax and Halcion, the Shiley heart valve, and the
Dalkon Shield intrauterine device, there were secret settlements and the public
was kept in the dark. Thus the dangers of these products were not known to the
public in spite of big awards of damages to private parties. But secrecy
agreements can also affect many other kinds of cases including criminal cases,
where the sealed record affords the guilty party protection from the
investigative efforts of law enforcement.

So
the responsibility of the judiciary to protect the interests of the public is
central to our system of justice, and weighing the privacy rights of the
parties versus the public's right to know is a crucial issue. The use of secret
settlements to withhold information about a known harm, whether it is a
defective product, toxic waste, or a molesting soccer coach, is often not in
the public good. No case more adequately represents this than the Fentress case,
in which the Kentucky Supreme Court found that lawyers who engaged in an
ongoing trial after a secret settlement had already been reached. Judge Potter
said their conduct showed "a serious lack of candor with the trial court,
and there may have been deception, bad faith conduct, abuse of the judicial
process or perhaps even fraud." [Potter v. Eli Lilly & Co., 926 S.W.2d
449, 454 (Ky. 1996).]

In
summary the Fentress case was about a violent incident in September 1989.
Joseph Wesbecker armed himself with an AK-47, walked into the Louisville
printing plant where he had worked, and started shooting his former co-workers.
After killing eight people, wounded twelve more, and the man finished matters
by committing suicide with his gun. Only one month before, Wesbecker had begun
taking Prozac. The known problems of violent behavior of patients on this
medication had been withheld from the public, governmental regulators and even
medical professionals. The lawyers for the shooting victims soon focused on the
drug Prozac, manufacted by Eli Lilly, as the cause for Wesbecker's unexpected
violence. With the sales of the drug Prozac at $1.7 billion in 1994 there was a
lot at stake in this legal case. The Plaintiff's counsel had information about
the withholding of research findings regarding another Eli Lilly drug Oraflex.
In 1985, Lilly had pled guilty to twenty-five criminal counts of failing to
report adverse reactions to Oraflex, including four deaths, to the Food &
Drug Administration. But then suddenly during the trial the Oraflex evidence
was no longer going to be presented to the court.

There
was an experienced and astute Judge on the case John Potter, who suspected
something was afoul despite the lawyers' denials and their references to a
damages phase, Potter suspected that a deal had been made before closing
argument. When the plaintiffs didn't file a notice of appeal, Potter became
suspicious and thus called in the lawyers from both sides for consultation. But
the lawyers continued to deny that a settlement had been reached. When the
appeals court ruled against Judge Potter saying he no longer had jurisdiction,
Potter was not satisfied and appealed the case to the Kentucky Supreme Court.
Finally in a Supreme Court hearing, lawyers for both sides finally acknowledged
that they had indeed settled all money issues and had agreed to go through only
the liability phase of the trial no matter what the result. Judge John Potter
took the "high road," acting consistently with the judiciary's
responsibility, and protecting the public interest. Thus the role of the
judiciary in deciding matters of privacy and sealed records is an important
balancing act of sometimes competing interests but which must also take into
account the public's right to know especially when there is a compelling public
interest.

Private secrecy at the cost of
public harm can happen in cases involving criminal intent. When discovery
occurs during case, many issues come to light including criminal activity of
either party. The consequences of permitting secrecy may be for attorneys to
lie to or mislead the court. Privacy issues can be used as a screen to hide
criminal activity, to provide a place for incriminating documents that can't be
expunged to be hidden from public view and investigation efforts. Under the
guise of the duty of attorney's to do zealous advocacy, some attorneys will
enter into agreements that benefit the client's best financial interest and the
public interest is often not served.

"I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air - that
progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of
no permanent value. In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my
instinct to side with the citizen ... I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by
law."....

H. L. Mencken

Harry S. Truman:

"Every segment of
our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government
a fair deal."

Speech to Congress 6th September 1945.

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself." Confucius

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who
points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds
could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is
actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and
blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and
again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but
who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms,
the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at
the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who
at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so
that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who
neither know victory nor defeat."

Theodore
Roosevelt- Excerpt from the speech "Citizenship In A Republic",
delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910

Medical Whistleblower Commitment to Non-Violence

Medical Whistleblower has a commitment to improving the protection of all civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights as defined in, among others, the following regional and international legal instruments:

• UN legal instruments pertaining to human rights, including: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the international covenants on civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights; the conventions providing for monitoring mechanisms (torture, racial discrimination, discrimination against women, the rights of the child, rights of migrant workers and their families); and the conventions and standards of the International Labor Organization;

• Special procedures and non-treaty mechanisms of the United Nations;

• The Declaration on Human Rights Defenders;

• The UN resolution establishing the mandate of the Special Representative of the Secretary General on human rights defenders;

• The United Nations guidelines on human rights defenders;

In addition, Medical Whistleblower upholds the principle of a code of ethical and moral conduct that all means used by Medical Whistleblower will not include violence - We exclude the use of violence to advance political aims. We work with and in collaboration with existing governmental structures and systems but put pressure on governments in a non-violent manner to achieve human rights protections and goals.

"The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience."

“When we call anything a person’s right, we mean that he has a
valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it, either by the
force of law, or by that of education and opinion”

John Stuart Mill

"The adversarial system of justice is by nature unfair and unjust. It favours the strongover the weak. It accentuates social and cultural differences, favouring the rich whoare able to engage and pay for the services of one or more layers."

Justice MinisterMadame Guigou, 1999

“Everything that is done in this world is done by hope.”
―Martin Luther

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“I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something
that I can do.”
― Edward Everett Hale

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